10.1.14

PINK FLOYD - No One Knew What They Looked Like

I wrote this piece for a Q magazine Pink Floyd special edition sometime in the 90s.

The box arrived in Melody Maker’s offices in December 1970, just in time for
Christmas, addressed to Michael Watts. It was a sturdily constructed hardwood
cube, painted dark red, about the size of half-a-dozen hardback books piled on
top of each other. It was very heavy, and Watts approached it with caution,
gingerly drawing back the catch that held down the lid. THWACK! It zapped open with
the speed of light and a boxing glove on a powerful spring shot out.

“It
would have broken my jaw if I hadn’t jumped out of the way fast,” says Watts
today. “It was a really powerfully built thing, very dangerous. It was a
Christmas present from the Pink Floyd. They hadn’t liked my review of Atom Heart Mother.”

* * *

Of all the globally elite British
groups of the Seventies, none were more shadowy than Pink Floyd. They didn't
send out review tickets to music magazines if they could help it, they never
invited the press along to anything and if EMI insisted on throwing a party to
launch an album, as they did with Dark
Side Of The Moon at the London Planetarium, then the Floyd famously sent
along cardboard cut-outs of themselves, partly as a sort of a droll joke but
mainly because they simply couldn’t be bothered to attend. They once boasted
that after a gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden they actually mingled with
the crowds who were leaving and weren’t recognised, and there was even a press
ad that featured the backs of their heads.

Notwithstanding
the gift they sent to my colleague Watts, who also recalls receiving a package
of putrefied offal from another (anonymous) dissatisfied customer, the
individual members of Pink Floyd weren’t as aggressively anti-press as Led
Zeppelin tended to be. Instead, they maintained a sort of aloof, couldn’t care
less attitude, as if courting the press and giving interviews was somehow
beneath them. While Zeppelin adopted their “We'll do it our way and show the
fuckin’ press we don’t need them” stance, with the Floyd it was more of a
disdainful “Press? Do we really have to bother with all that sort of thing?”
attitude. This may have stemmed from the upper-class upbringing of Nick Mason
and Rick Wright, posh folk being traditionally ambivalent towards the media,
but it was also a symptom of the anonymity they sought – none of the
increasingly successful albums that followed Ummagumma in 1969 featured photographs of the band on their sleeves
and on stage the four musicians eschewed spotlights, obscuring themselves
beneath a giant circular screen on which were projected light shows and
eye-catching film footage, or giant mobiles that drew attention away from the
boys in the band.

At
the Crystal Place Bowl show I attended in London in May 1971, a small lake intruded between
them and their audience from which there emerged an inflatable monster which,
of course, obscured the group. I first heard Dark Side Of The Moon at the Rainbow on February 17, 1972 (a full
12 months before it was released), and went back the next night because I
enjoyed it so much but I managed this not through the good offices of the Floyd
themselves but through the kindness of the manager of the theatre, John Morris,
who had given me a magic pass that read: “Admit to all parts of the theatre at
all times”.

Thus
it was that press contact with Pink Floyd was minimal. I actually recall
bumping into the whole band in a doctor’s surgery on Harley Street – they were
there to be inoculated against whatever it was that travellers might catch in
the Far East – and again in the TWA departure lounge at JKF Airport in New
York, but on neither occasion was I equipped to question them about their art,
not that they’d have responded anyway.

In
the end I finally ambushed Pink Floyd in Edinburgh on November 4,
1974, during a break from my stint as Melody
Maker’s New York correspondent. I simply found out which hotel they were
staying at (by ringing around) and booked myself in. I gained admittance to
their concert at the Usher Hall by buying a ticket from a tout, which was most
unusual since virtually every other act on the planet laid out the red carpet
for MM staff in those days.
Afterwards, hanging around in the lobby, I was looked upon with deep suspicion
but I knew the promoter Harvey Goldsmith and through him somehow managed to
ingratiate myself into their large party and partake of a sumptuous post-gig
supper with them and their entourage, about 20 of us around a huge table in a
private room. At first I sat alongside their manager Steve O’Rourke who seemed
an agreeable chap if you were prepared to talk about fast cars but before the
food arrived I was asked to move by Storm Thorgerson from the Hipgnosis design
team “because there was something important I need to discuss with Steve”. Over
dinner I detected an atmosphere of civilised maturity; none of the
japes, womanising and loutish behaviour brought on by a surfeit of alcohol or drugs that
were the hallmark of post-concert parties thrown by so many other groups. The
Pink Floyd, I realised, were adults, and they behaved like them too.

None
of the band really wanted to do an interview with me but I persisted and the
following day found myself in the hotel lobby face to face over a tape recorder with Rick Wright
who’d evidently drawn the shortest straw. I would have preferred to interview
Roger Waters but he was unwilling as he wanted to play golf, there being many
fine courses close to Edinburgh. I recall being astonished that Waters played
golf as it seemed the unlikeliest of pastimes for a man whose lyrical
preoccupations were space-flight, insanity and death.

Unlike
almost all of their contemporaries Pink Floyd in those days liked to perform
new songs on stage before they had actually been recorded, a fairly brave move
since this might enable bootleggers to record shows and release material before
it came out through the official channels. At the Usher Hall the previous night
they’d performed ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ which wouldn’t be made available
until Wish You Here was released in
September, 1975, and two other new pieces ‘Raving And Drooling’ and ‘Gotta Be
Crazy’, both of which eventually surfaced on Animals no less than three years later, in 1977, retitled ‘Sheep’
and ‘Dogs’ respectively.

“I
can’t think of any other bands that work this way,” said Wright over a cup of
tea in the hotel lobby. “Usually bands record songs and then play them but we
feel that if you do a few tours with a number, then that number improves
immensely. We will probably record them after the tour.”

Wright
turned out to be a loquacious interviewee, to some degree dispelling the aura
of non-communication that surrounded the group. It seemed to me that once you’d
penetrated the shell, it was plain sailing, and we talked at some length about
the extraordinary success of Dark Side
which seemed to have taken the group by surprise. “It’s changed me in many ways
because it’s brought in a lot of money and one feels very secure when you can
sell an album for two years. We knew it had a lot more melody than previous
Floyd albums and there was a concept that ran all through it. The music was
easier to absorb and having girls singing away added a commercial touch that
none of our other records had.”

We
talked about the visuals that enhance their shows, how he and Gilmour were
keener on touring than Mason and Waters, and how each member of the Floyd had
plans for solo albums and wanted to spend six months of each year on this and
six months with the group. In hindsight this seems like wishful thinking but at
the time, before Waters’ domination threatened their future, made good sense.

I
couldn’t resist raising the issue of their anonymity. “We are not trying to
sell ourselves, just the music,” Wright ventured after a moment’s pause. “Right
from the start we adopted this policy. We have never had a publicity agent and
we’ve never found it necessary to employ one. We don’t go to all the ‘in’
parties and we don’t go to all the ‘in’ clubs. People don’t recognise us on the
streets and even if they did it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s changed since I
moved out of London to Cambridge where people don’t know anything about the
Floyd.

“Sometimes
I get people tramping through my garden and asking for my autograph because
they’ve heard I’m in a pop group but they don’t know what the Floyd do. They
probably think we’re like Gary Glitter.”

Wright
further admitted that he, and by extension probably his colleagues too,
maintained a discreet distance from the entire music scene. “I ignore the way
pop is going,” he said. “I have completely lost touch with the singles charts
[this was 1974 remember, when the singles charts often threw up decent stuff –
CC]. I don’t listen to what is being played on the radio. I don’t watch Top Of The Pops and I don’t watch The Old Grey Whistle Test. I don’t even
know how the rock business is going, expect that I think the bubble will burst
fairly soon.”

Wright
was astute enough to predict a long career for the group. “It could last forever,”
he said. “We still have much to do together. We probably do things much better
with each other than we could with anyone else. We’re not underground anymore,
despite what people say. At the UFO it was underground but you can’t be
underground when you sell out every concert hall and your album goes to number
one. No, the Pink Floyd can’t claim to be underground any more.”

The conversation over, Wright
excused himself, and I caught a train back to London happy in the knowledge
that I'd secured a small scoop for Melody
Maker and found a way to penetrate this most impenetrable of groups.
Unfortunately, whatever bridges I thought I might have built between Pink Floyd
and the press were swiftly demolished. Punk rock was still at least three years
away, but in some quarters the tide was already turning. Reviewing Pink Floyd's
performance at Wembley Empire Pool less than a fortnight later, NME’s star writer Nick Kent laid into
the band without mercy, describing their performance as "a pallid excuse for creating
music". Even more controversially, he opened his review with a complaint
about the state of David Gilmour's hair, describing it as "seemingly
anchored down by a surfeit of scalp grease and tapering off below the shoulders
with a spectacular festooning of split ends." It was to prove too much. A
furious Gilmour demanded an audience with NME
to address the review. There would be no more boxing gloves delivered to the
office but Pink Floyd’s wall – not for the first time or last time – was back
up again.